The ObamaCare Archipelago

“You’ve got to give President Obama this much: his health-care plan might be the most comprehensive failure in the history of American government. Never before has a program tried to control so much, at such soaring expense, and utterly failed in every single way. Insurance is getting less affordable for many Americans; plans are getting wiped out left and right, contrary to Obama’s promises; the quality of medical care is declining as provider networks contract, also contrary to Obama’s promises; the cost of the Affordable Care Act is soaring high enough to make its original cost estimates look ridiculous; and the insurance industry has been hollowed out enough to enter the bailout zone.

“But perhaps worst of all, there are new studies that show uninsured Americans are profoundly uninterested in ObamaCare. The ostensible point of this hideously expensive exercise – the way it was sold to the American people – was the desperate need to bring insurance coverage to those left in the cold by the old system. A trillion dollars later, it turns out most of the uninsured would rather stay out in the cold. …

“The Democrats who perpetrated ObamaCare maintained that uninsured Americans were victims of an uncaring system, but the number of truly ‘hardcore’ uninsured was always far smaller than they claimed. Quite a few people simply didn’t want to buy insurance, and while some of them might have benefited from education and outreach – which private insurance firms could be given proper economic incentives to provide – there are a lot of people who made rational decisions not to pay for health insurance. Nothing about the Affordable Care Act is likely to change their assessment. In almost every respect, it’s doing the opposite of what would be necessary to expand private insurance markets deep into the ranks of previously uninterested customers.

“This really should be the final nail in ObamaCare’s coffin. The last stand for its defenders was the argument that sure, most of American hates this law and they’re suffering because of it – calling out sympathetic ObamaCare victims as ‘liars’ sure as hell didn’t do the Democrats any good – but it’s all worthwhile for the Greater Good, because millions of Americans will get insurance coverage for the first time. That isn’t happening.” —John Hayward,ObamaCare’s Ultimate Failure: The Uninsured Aren’t Buying

“‘Lies,’ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid calls the TV ads that feature people complaining about ObamaCare. Sorry: The people in those ads are sick, but their new health policies don’t let them see the specialists or get the medications they need. These patients aren’t liars; they’re people President Obama claimed he would help, who instead are being harmed.

“They had insurance, but their plans got canceled because of the Affordable Care Act, forcing them into ObamaCare. Now they’re discovering that ObamaCare plans aren’t for sick people. They offer ‘free’ mammograms, ‘free’ colonoscopies, and ‘free’ contraceptives — meaning you don’t have a copay. But if you have cancer, MS or Parkinson’s, you’re in trouble: Most ObamaCare plans skimp on specialists and life-saving drugs. …

“‘ObamaCare is a throwback to the old HMO model of the 1990s, which promised a broad package of coverage for primary-care benefits like vaccines and routine doctor visits. But to pay for these benefits, the ObamaCare plans skimp on other things, principally the number of doctors you’ll have access to and also the number of costlier branded drugs,’ explains Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a practicing physician and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. …

“Before the Affordable Care Act, nine out of every ten Americans with pre-existing conditions had coverage. They got it through an employer-provided plan, Medicare or Medicaid without discrimination. Only the individual-policy market let insurers charge sick people more or turn them away — and even in that market most got covered. Nationwide, only 2 million to 4 million people with health problems couldn’t get coverage. That’s about 1 percent of the population — a small, fixable problem. But ObamaCare doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it far worse. As millions lose on-the-job coverage this year or next and get pushed into ObamaCare, those with pre-existing illnesses will have the same difficulty getting care as the patients in the TV ads. It’s no lie.” —Betsy McCaughey,How ObamaCare Slaps the Sick

“In Oregon this week, officials confessed that nearly 4,000 illegal immigrants had been ‘accidentally’ steered from the state’s low-income Medicaid program and instead were enrolled in Obamacare in violation of the law. Oopsie. The Oregonian newspaper’s Nick Budnick reported that the health bureaucrats ‘discovered the problem several weeks ago and are correcting it.’ Get in line. The beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange has been riddled with ongoing problems, errors and glitches since last October that have yet to be fixed.

“Take note: This wasn’t a one-time computer meltdown. Because Oregon’s health insurance exchange website has been offline and its software architects under investigation for possible fraud, the Oregon Obamacare drones have been processing each and every application manually. That means nearly 4,000 illegal alien applications with ‘inaccurate’ data somehow passed through government hands and somehow ended up getting routed through as new enrollees with Obamacare-approved full-service health care.

“How many Obamacare services did these nearly 4,000 illegal aliens avail themselves of, and at what cost? Does anyone believe the same incompetent boobs who enrolled them will be able to track down the nearly 4,000 illegal alien beneficiaries, ‘correct’ the ‘errors’ and ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

“What a slap in the face to the millions of law-abiding Americans who have lost their health care coverage and work hours thanks to Democratic-sponsored federal health care regulatory burdens and mandate costs.” —Michelle Malkin,The Inevitability of ObamaCare for Illegal Aliens

“If you like your plan … er, your doctor … I mean, your premiums … it’s all the same now. A new report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) shows that ObamaCare will force small businesses to pay higher premiums for health insurance, despite years of promises that the law will reduce health-care costs. …

“The Washington Post’s J. D. Harrison reports that CMS officials expect these businesses to pass these costs onto their employees, which means that they will end up earning less in wages. Alternately, these businesses can simply dump their employees out of their health insurance, especially if they fall under the 50-employee floor of the mandate and don’t have to pay a penalty. That means millions of people may find themselves in the already-horrid individual market, many without subsidies, which will eat even further into their incomes.

“But ObamaCare has at least limited the cost increases in these premiums up to now, right? Wrong. The National Small Business Administration reports that the average premium cost has risen from $590 in 2009, the year before ObamaCare’s passage, to more than $1100 in 2014. That’s more than double the premium costs, before the application of the mandate. So much for bending the cost curve downward.” —Ed Morrissey,CMS: Two-Thirds of Small Businesses to Pay Higher Premiums Under ObamaCare

“During her tenure as an Obamacare “navigator,” Rasmieh Yousef Odeh had access to Illinois consumers’ sensitive personal data. Unbeknownst to those citizens, and to her employer, Ms. Odeh has an extremely sordid past. She was convicted for her role in three bombings, including one that killed two innocent people at an Israeli supermarket in the late 1960’s. …

“Fortunately, Illinois officials pulled the plug on this woman relatively quickly; they were tipped off to her terrorist status by a US Attorney’s office in Michigan. Disconcertingly, the state’s background check didn’t catch this — shall we say — rather significant omission from her resume. Even more alarming is the fact that the federal government doesn’t even require states to conduct any criminal background checks on Obamacare navigators, a stunning reality confirmed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in Congressional testimony in November. …

“Last Friday, the administration added another ‘tweak’ to a provision in the law it had already illegally altered. After determining that many of the state-run health exchanges were poorly run, they decided that individuals who obtain healthcare coverage outside of those exchanges are still eligible for health insurance subsidies. Again, Section 1401 of the ACA states that subsidies shall be available ‘through an Exchange established by the State under Section 1311’ of the law. The administration already steamrolled past Section, 1401 unilaterally determining that the words ‘state’ and ‘federal government’ were interchangeable terms with regard to those exchanges. Now neither of them are relevant, as the administration has determined insurance subsidies can be offered to anyone.

“And as the AP noted in reporting the change, that move was also transparently political. ‘Although the new policy fix is available to any state, Republican governors basically defaulted to federal control of online sign-ups in their states,’ they report. ‘Those who stand to benefit the most are Democratic governors who plunged ahead and ran into problems. Some are facing sharp criticism at home, from both sides of the political aisle.’” —Arnold Ahlert,The President’s Devious ObamaCare Delays

“The federal government is not even measuring the very number ObamaCare was created to bring down. How many times did we hear 47 million uninsured? How many times did we hear it was necessary to pass a huge revamp of the entire system to insure them? Later we heard the prediction for how many of those 47 million we’ll actually insure is quite underwhelming. Now, we ask: Hey, how many of the uninsured are we actually insuring?

“There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.

“President Obama carried his healthcare reform message directly to Latinos on Thursday, urging the members of that vast community to obtain coverage under the Affordable Care Act before the approaching March 31 deadline.

“Speaking at a forum conducted at the Newseum in downtown Washington and broadcast over several Spanish-language media outlets, the president offered assurance to Latinos concerned that utilizing the newly established insurance exchanges could somehow lead to the deportation of undocumented relatives, asserting ‘I’ve got their back.’

“‘The main point that I have for everybody watching right now is, you don’t punish me by not signing up for healthcare,’ Obama said. ‘You’re punishing yourself or your family if in fact there’s affordable healthcare to be had.’

“Told about one individual in particular, a mother who expressed alarm that she could face deportation if she enrolled her children, who happen to be citizens, with the health exchange, the president said she ‘should not be fearful.’

Post navigation

2 Responses to The ObamaCare Archipelago

Reblogged this on Citizen Tom and commented:
If Obamacare was not for real, it would be funny. As it is, what is funny is the fact we cannot get rid of it. Yep! We have a very funny government these days.